Infrastructure must replace focus on single diseases to speed up progress on health, says report

On the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation, its Development Assistance Committee is calling for a “new era” in the global strategy for achieving development goals.

It is time to “rethink the totality of development relationships,” said the committee’s chairman, Brian Atwood, former head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in an introduction to a special anniversary edition of the OECD’s annual development cooperation report.

The combination of increasing globalisation and the world’s changing economic geography means that the old division between the rich “North” (donor countries) and the poor “South” (recipients) has turned into a much more complex map. Better cooperation among …